DIY CAUTION HOW TO PAINT RV WALLS & CABINETS. We Painted the Interior of our Fifth Wheel! Learn...

We painted the inside of our fifth wheel and we love it. It looks great, but it didn't quite go as planned. I'll tell you today what worked, what didn't work, what tools we used, and what we learned. Hey everybody, it's Robin with CreativityRV. About a month ago we did a tour of our completely renovated fifth wheel. Now we were amazed how many questions we got about paint. So today I'm going to tell you everything about our experience painting, what we used, and how we finally got the results that we got even after we screwed up a few times. Now here you can see what our RV looked like before. It was brown, it was drab, and we really lightened it up, but I'll tell you it was a lot of work. We thought it would just take a couple of weeks to paint this entire thing. I mean it's the size of a studio apartment. What could go wrong? If you want to paint the inside of an RV, the first thing you have to know is it's totally different than painting the inside of a house. First of all, it's a tiny space and painting it completely takes over your life. You don't have drywall and even corners. You have this thin wallpaper usually that they glue onto plywood and when you start looking at it you're going to see that things are uneven and there are holes everywhere and staples and just random stuff that you have to deal with. I did a lot of research before we started this project and I found a couple of blogs from people that had painted the inside of their RVs. Both these blogs are known for being frugal so I was really surprised that at the end they both said that if they had to do it again they would have hired somebody and I thought well that's weird. How hard could it be? Well as soon as we started we found all kinds of stuff we weren't expecting and figured out pretty quick why the manufacturers make these rigs brown and it's not to hide dirt. I think it's to hide the way that they're put together. We had holes. We had things that were uneven. In fact our fan was falling out of the ceiling and we discovered that it only had two screws in it, not four. When we took those old-fashioned window coverings off we were shocked to find out that our window frames were just punched into the wall at different angles. More about that in a second. First let me tell you about the paint. Like I said RV walls have this weird paper on plywood and they have a nubby texture and a light sheen. First we went through and repaired the walls like cleaned up little areas where the paper was puckered or there might have been a divot or a hole. We just took off the paper and put in some spackle or wood filler whatever worked best for that spot and sanded before we painted. Then, and you're not going to want to do this step but you have to, we cleaned both the walls and the cabinets with crud cutter. This is a strong cleaner. It comes in a spray bottle. You do have to get protective gloves to use it, but you spray it on the walls and then you wipe it off and then you wipe it off again with a clean towel. What it does is it removes any grease or dirt that's stuck on the walls. Now if you live in an RV like we do, you know that these fans suck the air in and up out the fan so what happens is dust does come into the RV. We were actually amazed after only living in here a little over a year how much dust came off the walls when we used the crud cutter. We did the same thing on the cabinets and then we sanded the cabinets with a fine sandpaper like a 600. And look, we started to get a little bit tired and didn't do the best cleaning or sanding a couple of times and we could really see the difference in the way the paint laid on especially in the corners. Don't miss this step. It makes all the difference in how it looks in the end. Now you might be wondering if we used a primer. Well yes and no. I started painting in the bathroom and I thought it might take a coat of primer maybe two three coats of paint. I was shocked because it actually took three coats of primer. I used Styx waterborne primer for this but I could still see the texture in the wall and the brown was still coming through. After that I did four coats of paint and it took forever and I thought oh my gosh is this the way it's going to be to paint this whole house? Well let me stop right here and tell you that I was making a big mistake. I was using a roller that was styrofoam instead of using one that has a heavy nap. I didn't know this at the time but if you have a heavier nap on the roller it helps to get into that texture better and then it would have taken less coats. And then we discovered when we moved out to paint the hallway that we didn't actually need the primer at all because the paint we chose was Kills Tribute that has the primer built in. So we stopped using the primer on the walls and we did the rest of the house with three or four coats of only the Kills Tribute paint with a primer built in. It's worked great. It looks good and none of the brown has come through and it hasn't cracked and it hasn't faded. Now the cabinets were a different story. For the cabinets I used Nuvo paint and I followed their directions precisely. They recommended using an oil-based primer which I started with and it looked okay in the end but it was really a mess to work with so I switched back over to the Styx primer which I liked a lot better. So again for the cabinets we cleaned them, we sanded them, then we used a primer and then the paint. And I'll tell you we discovered a little tool that made all the difference thanks to our friend Eric at Wonderville. He showed us this little scraper. So after we started painting we could take this little scraper just along the paint and it would take up any bubbles that we didn't like and then we used a fine paintbrush for the top coat. Everything we used, all of the tools and the colors, I'm going to go ahead and put in my Amazon list so if you go to the top of comments there's going to be one link right there. If you hit it it's going to be right there where you can see it and you can check out everything we used. So we were on a roll, we were psyched, it was looking good and then we had a big setback. For some reason we found that the manufacturer had used this unpaintable clear silicone caulk everywhere in the RV. I mean it was on the walls, it was between the countertops on the walls and the tile and on the cabinets. It was everywhere and after we painted we would come back five minutes later and it looked awful. It was just separating in these big globs. So everywhere there was this caulk and it was all over the place. We had to go back and clean it up. Luckily we found a tip on YouTube that told us to blow dry it a little bit first because it helps loosen it up and then gosh we used razor blades and a scraper and tweezers and all kinds of stuff to get it off and it took forever. The stuff does not want to come up and it sticks in the cracks. I found if you don't clean it all up and you try to paint over it that doesn't work and then if you try and half clean it and re-caulk it that doesn't work. So this is where I'm at now. I have to get all this gross stuff off. We learned how to clean it up and fix it and when we're done you'll never know this happened. I wish I had known that and I had done it before we started painting. I thought I was actually done and then I run my finger over it and there's still a ton left in here. There's some more. It never stops. See again I thought I was done and then I get down to here and there's still some in here. It's a drag. I know you can buy some solvents that help remove this a little bit or WD-40 but because this wall is basically paper over plywood I did not want to put any of that down in here because I don't know what that would do to an RV wall so I'm just having to do it by hand. As I get rid of the last of this terrible non-paintable silicone caulk that's everywhere it does take up some of the paper that's on the walls. There's nothing I can do about that so I'm just gonna sand the edge, put some spackle there to flatten it out, sand it again, re-caulk it. After all that work you can imagine we were exhausted. We were like four weeks in but it was looking good and so then we went and took off all the tape that we put on and I'll tell you we went a little tape crazy like we would if we painted a house. That was a big mistake. If had to do it again we wouldn't use tape at all because unlike drywall where you've got one surface and a ceiling that's another surface and there's a good sharp angle, RVs don't have that. There's a lot of floating surfaces and so we put this tape on and the edges would just eat the tape so when we took the tape off it was stuck in corners. It took the tape off with it and again we had these big gaps in the paint so we had to go back and clean it up and sand it and reprime it and repaint it. We learned to just use an edging brush and we found these great wipes that I'll put on the list. We would just keep the wipe in one hand and the edging brush in the other and we would just do it by hand and when we screwed up we would just take it right off with this wipe and that worked great. If I had to do it again I wouldn't even buy tape. We hated it. Again it added a ton of work and we're still finding tape remnants all over this house. After we were done we were pretty happy with the results except that sometimes near the walls up by the ceiling the paint would kind of stick to the ceiling because again there's not a good edge there and so Doug got up there and started using a razor blade to cut the paint to try and get a cleaner edge and finally we decided to stop doing that because we thought it might come apart naturally when we traveled and it did. So some areas where there was paint now that we've gone down the road we have this nice clean line and then in other areas after we traveled we actually are finding some cracks like in corners in the kitchen but we took our leftover paint and we put it into little bottles that have brushes keep them in the kitchen drawer and when we see something we just touch it up. So in the end we are really happy with the results in here. I mean it just seems like it doubled in size and it's so light and airy and modern and the sunshine comes in but it was a lot of work. A lot of that work we created for ourselves. I hope if you want to pay your RV these tips actually help you because now instead of this feeling like a car we just drove off a lot it feels like our home and while there is some pride in having done it ourselves I have to tell you like those two bloggers if we had to do it again we might get some bits from professional painters and see if it was worth it to do it ourselves. We're not experts this is just what worked for us so do you have any advice for the people watching this video? If you do please do put it down in the comments below or if you have a cautionary tale put that down there too. Please share this video if you know anyone that could use it. Give it a thumbs up if you liked it. Consider subscribing if you haven't already and I'll see you all next Sunday. Until then have happy travels and be free.